Edge of the Empire Dice Mechanics

Below are the seven types of dice that come in the Beginner Game. For now, we’ll ignore the Force Die (white); it’s used in rare and special dice pools when the mysterious power of the Force is taken into account.

The other six main dice, three positive and three negative, make up the Edge of the Empire custom dice system. Ability, Proficiency, and Boost dice provide beneficial symbols, and represent a character’s basic aptitude, advanced training, and environmental advantages. Conversely, Difficulty, Challenge, and Setback dice provide negative symbols, and represent a task’s inherent complexity, active opposition, and environmental disadvantages.

Skills and difficulties are built into the dice rolls. It might take some time to get used to the dice colors and symbols, but it should be a more elaborate version of Fudge or FATE where dice cancel each other out and the remaining dice determines your result.

My first impression was `Huh? Sounds confusing?` but then again as a teacher I know it’s far easier to learn something via doing. The dice do look cool and seem to present a unique mechanic (well, unique to me!).
Could you give us an example of how they work? I’d like to see some mechanics..how a simple blaster attack is resolved, for example.

Could you give us an example of how they work? I’d like to see some mechanics..how a simple blaster attack is resolved, for example.

There's an example on how a droid repairs a speeder in the link above.

Basically, you have dice for your skill and an extra dice if you're proficient. You also roll the difficulty dice depending on difficulty.

You also have extra advantage and complication dice if the situation calls for it. Skill dice and the difficulty dice cancel each other out to see if you succeed or not. The advantage and complication dice cancel each other out to see if you get extra benefits or disadvantages whether you succeed or not.

There are also Force dice if you use the force. I have no idea how this works exactly, but I can guess based on the above.

I thought this would be a chore when I played Warhammer, but the GM determined what dice to use and interpreted the rolls very quickly when he got the hang of it.

Though I'm really interested in what they do with this game, I've got to be honest, I'm not looking forward to learning a non-numerical system. Also, given my prior work on converting the SAGA Edition stuff, I'd been curious as to whether it's even going to be possible to take FFG's system and make even a rough translation into D6. Though, I'm willing to keep an open mind, and I'm probably going to pick up the basic starter adventure game to get some sense of the game (not to mention get my hands on some of those really cool maps).

Heh. Yeah, there's been a fair portion of that in the D6 history since 1998.

Though I must say that there is something exciting about the mechanics of this new game. The idea of reading dice to introduce success with complications, or failure with some rewards is not unlike how I do certain aspects of the Wild Die in D6. So, having that idea prescribed in a new Star Wars game is kind of exciting.

Conversion of stuff is pretty straight forward I would dare claim. I've been working on a growing supplement of starships and weapons - from various d20 and d6 sources.

This system doesn't support the granular damage that d20 and d6 to varying degrees did support, but it has other mechanics (attachments with modification options) that can be easily used to cause similar effects, and the system's logic is pretty easy to grasp if you need to make up your own stuff.

The one "big" issue, is that they have moved away from tonnage when it comes to starship cargo capacity, instead they use a rather vague notion just called "encumbrance" - which doesn't easily translate to and from tons.

The current version of the fringers' starships and weapons catalogue I've constructed can be found here.

"What about the future...? We can only hope, we cannot however account for the minutiae of the quanta, as all accidents in an infinite space are inevitable."

I can see conversion being a pain. Anyway, I guess we could do what we've always done with D6 before WOTC. Make stuff up as we go along as close as possible to the source. ;-)

Actually, conversion of prior material isn't that difficult... provided you're willing to accept that it's not really a strict conversion formula. I've done some converted material from D6 and Saga Edition to EotE as a planned series of articles for the Gamer Security Agency (a few of which have been published so far, with more to come).

The hard part is figuring out what's "acceptable" in terms of Hull, Strain, Shield Rating, and Encumbrance, as the Beta and Beginner Box don't exactly provide a wealth on non-humanoid examples to go by.

After having the Beginner Game for a couple of weeks, I've come to think conversions can be pretty easy. You just have to factor for the more fine tuning of skills (1D, 1D+1, 1D+2, 2D, etc) to the more general Ranks (1, 2, 3) for the EotE skills. Need to see Luke's stats when the rulebook is released.